‘Like a horror movie.’ Sacramento Afghan community fears for friends, relatives in Kabul
Besmellah Khuram didn’t sleep on Saturday night.
Anxious about the swift Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, the 36-year-old Sacramento man flipped between news clips and tried to make sense of what was unfolding in his home country. He’d been in touch with his brother and his mother, who live in Kabul.
Their collective panic deepened with every passing hour as the Taliban encircled their city, then overtook it.
“There is no word to express how we feel about the loss of 18, 20 years’ achievement in one night,” said Khuram, who assisted the U.S. government on the ground in Afghanistan and received a Special Immigrant Visa in 2015 that allowed him to come to Sacramento.
On Sunday night, he cried.
The region has long been one of the largest destinations for SIV holders like Khuram. One out of every nine Afghan natives living in the U.S. resides in the Sacramento region. About 9,700 Afghan people live in the county alone, more than any other county in the U.S., according to census data. Another 2,000 live in Yolo, Sutter, Placer or El Dorado counties.
They’re drawn here by California’s array of social programs and established immigrant communities. The capital area’s climate, Khuram said, helps make it “feel like home.”
It’ll likely soon be home to many more Afghans.
For weeks, people fleeing the country with SIVs have been landing at Sacramento International Airport, a family or two at a time. Four reportedly came in over the weekend. Khuram, who runs a community group for Afghans, went to the airport earlier this month to welcome new arrivals.
Estimates of how many more Afghans will be brought here are varied, a calculus that was thrown into disarray by the weekend’s Taliban takeover. The Sacramento chapter of the International Rescue Committee on Thursday said it anticipated the arrival of at least 1,700 Afghan SIV evacuees before the end of the year. Updated estimates were not immediately available.
Uncertainty on the ground in Afghanistan has translated to unpredictability in Sacramento.
Local resettlement agencies typically have at least two weeks to coordinate housing and other logistics for the arrival of an SIV holder and their family. Sometimes that lead time can be two months, said Jessie Tientcheu, CEO of Opening Doors.
They’ve had as little as a 48-hour notice in recent weeks, she said Monday.
The pace has soared lately, too. About 170 Afghan citizens were scheduled to land in Sacramento in August and be resettled by Opening Doors — 93 arrived in the first two weeks of the month, before travel from Kabul was upended. Most of the most recent arrivals are living in hotels until a more permanent option comes up, a difficult order in a region with a pronounced lack of affordable housing.
“What we are seeing right now, in terms of both the increased numbers just from July to August, as well as the existing housing crisis in Sacramento, is unlike what we have seen in the past,” Tientcheu said.
The Special Immigrant Visa program was created in 2006 for Afghans and Iraqis who have worked alongside the U.S. forces during the two-decade war. Contracted often as translators or interpreters, SIV applicants might be targeted by opposition forces, like the Taliban. The program relocates them and their families to the U.S. where they can be on a path to lawful permanent residency.
Through March, roughly 100,000 Afghan and Iraqi nationals had received SIVs. Approval can take months, sometimes years. About 2,000 SIV holders have arrived in the U.S. in the past two weeks, officials said. With Taliban leaders descending on Kabul, applicants have flooded the system with requests. Images showed frantic people clamoring over computer screens trying to complete the necessary paperwork to get out of the country.
Khuram said he’s trying to find a way out for his family. But when he spoke to them on Saturday, they were but two among the thousands of people desperately seeking answers to a rapidly unfolding crisis.
“They say, what should we do?” Khuram said. “There is no way they can make it to escape the country. Nobody is giving them a visa. They cannot go anywhere. The whole country is in the hands of the Taliban.”
Where will they live in Sacramento?
In the Sacramento area, most of Tientcheu’s clients are housed temporarily in hotels until a more permanent option comes up. That’s “obviously a big challenge,” she said, because of the region’s costly housing market and California’s shortage of rental units in general.
“Yes, we’re getting people into safety,” Tientcheu said. “But are we going to be resettling them into other kinds of vulnerability?”
Those other kinds of vulnerability were the subject of a Sacramento Bee 2016 investigation on the grim realities of SIV resettlements. The Bee chronicled the challenges of highly skilled workers who arrived in Sacramento, only to wind up trapped in minimum-wage jobs. Those who worked alongside U.S. troops were stuck in aging, bug-infested apartment complexes in high-crime neighborhoods. Sometimes, they were victims of violence.
A 2018 federal review of SIV programs called attention to rising housing costs across the country, particularly in California. Investigators also spotlighted other worrying trends that could affect newly arrived families.
“In one of our Sacramento focus groups,” the report says, “several female SIV spouses reported that they wanted to take English classes and find work, but the cost of childcare and lack of public transportation, including school buses for their children, were prohibitive.”
That same year, the federal government stopped sending county-by-county reports about SIV resettlements. Between 2014 and 2018, about 8,800 Afghan refugees were brought to Sacramento County, the latest state data show.
The highest concentration of Afghan natives is in the Arden-Arcade area. More Afghans live in the 95821 and 95825 ZIP codes, located in western and northern Arden-Arcade, than in any other ZIP codes in America, according to census data.
They’re predominantly young — the median age is 29 — and often arrive with very little. About half live below the poverty line.
“The sense of urgency has to be on getting people to safety,” Tientcheu said. “And I understand that sense of urgency. But I hope that we can engage with our county and state and federal partners, to really understand that the commitment doesn’t end once folks get on that plane.
“That we have made a commitment to people who have supported our forces, and that commitment has to extend to helping them build lives of stability and security here.”
‘Like a horror movie’
There’s a “big sense of the unknown” for local Afghans who had hopes of one day returning to the country, said Oussama Mokeddem, policy and advocacy manager for the Council on American-Islamic Relations Sacramento Valley.
Mokeddem said those already living in the Sacramento area have heard of their relatives leaving their homes and trying to escape in “the darkness of night.”
“This is very much a sad situation,” Mokeddem said. “...The dust hasn’t settled yet, so it’s hard to know exactly what is happening.”
Gulshan Yusufzai, executive director of the Sacramento-based Muslim American Society-Social Services Foundation, said it’s difficult to express the weight of what’s happened in Afghanistan — especially for former refugees living in the U.S.
Yusufzai fled Afghanistan 32 years ago when she was a child. She has relatives who still live there.
She said she spent the past weekend glued to the television trying to learn as much as she could from news reports as the regime with “a history of being very cruel” once again seized power in Afghanistan.
“Everyone is very scared and very worried. Our hands are tied right now, there’s nothing we can do,” Yusufzai said Monday. “You’re watching it on TV, it’s like a horror movie.”
Her relatives were not trying to leave Afghanistan; they have not worked with U.S. authorities in the past. But Yusufzai said they are worried about what happens after U.S. forces leave the country for good.
Her focus now is offering mental health support to Afghan families worrying about what will happen to their families still in Afghanistan. The non-profit offers peer counseling in five languages from trained volunteers from various educational and ethnic backgrounds.
The counseling comes from people who understand their cultural background and their experience as a refugee — the foundation also has connections to state and county resources that can help families establish themselves here.
Yusufzai’s family settled in Sacramento because her uncle already lived here, and the federal government tries to re-settle families where they have relatives.
“I don’t doubt that there will be another highway of refugees heading to Sacramento,” Yusufzai said.
This story was originally published August 16, 2021 at 12:08 PM.